The Schoolhouse Blizzard

In 1888, a blizzard so sudden and severe hit the American Midwest and claimed the lives of hundreds, some of whom died just outside the safety of shelter. Weather prediction of the fast-moving storm simply didn't reach people in time to prepare them.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
I'm Crazy and I'm Holly frying Doday, we have a
listener request. It's one of those listener requests that came
in immediately after I had already ordered the book from

(00:24):
the library, and I feel really guilty that I did
not write down the name of the person I was
having a conversation about or a conversation with about it,
because it was on Facebook and those are impossible to
find weeks later on our Facebook. But if you remember
the sad story that I said I was going to
put off until after the New year a few weeks ago,

(00:46):
when we talked about the Sodder children, when I said,
this sounds sad, but just wait, there's something way sadder. Welcome. Yeah, welcome.
So the way sadder episode it is the Schoolhouse Blizzard,
also known as the Children's Blizzard. It was a storm
in in which many, many children and also many adults

(01:08):
froze to death in the snow, sometimes literally right outside
of the safety of shelter. This was a tragedy that
grew from a confluence of factors, and one of them
was our ability to forecast the weather. A recurring theme
in our episodes on the Western frontier days of the
United States is that weather could cause enormous problems, and

(01:31):
it wasn't just because the weather itself in this part
of the North American continent can be unpredictable and prone
to extremes. The colonists and homesteaders living there were often
newcomers to a region that just didn't have a lot
of resources to deal with unexpected extremes. This Western migration
of newcomers into an unfamiliar area was absolutely deliberate. The

(01:52):
United States specifically wanted to populate land that had previously
been inhabited by North Americans indigenous people's with its own citizens,
among other things. In eighteen sixty two, President Abraham Lincoln
had signed the Homestead Act into law, and this provided
people with a hundred and sixty acres of land and
exchange for a fault a small fee, plus five years

(02:14):
of continuous residents on that land. Soldiers who had served
in the Union Army had a year remove for each
year that they had served during the Civil War. Homesteaders
and other newcomers didn't necessarily know how to deal with
the region's weather or even how to run a homestead,
But they were often desperate to hang on to that
hundred and sixty acres for the required number of years.

(02:37):
People wrote out storms and other events that might otherwise
have prompted them to flee, if not for the fact
that if they did, they would have lost all their
land and all of the work they had already put
into it. The relative newness of this western expansion also
meant that the region just didn't have the infrastructure it
needed to deal with these types of problems. For example,

(02:58):
in the long winter of eighteen a to one, so
just a few years before we're talking about today, Uh,
that would have been a lot easier to deal with. Um.
It was an extremely long and snowy season that we've
talked about in a prior episode. And if communities had
had a few more years of experience under their belts,
more time to build roads and improve their homes and businesses,

(03:19):
and more seasons to try to lay aside extra food
and other resources in case of that kind of event,
it would have been a lot easier to deal with.
This was certainly the case here. Many of the homesteaders
living in the American Midwest at this point, we're still
living in the sod huts that they directed upon first
arriving at their land claim, and homesteaders who weren't quite
as new to the area had also been through a

(03:41):
series of setbacks in recent years, including plagues of the
now extinct Rocky Mountain locusts, prairie fires, floods, and of
course other blizzards and uncommonly snowy winters. Much of this
we've covered in our podcast on Laura Ingles Wilder, who
grew up in this area during this period of time.
So it may come as a surprise to people that

(04:02):
what the nation actually did have at this point was
a formal, although imperfect system for trying to predict the
weather and notify people of oncoming storms. Basic meteorological equipment
like thermometers, barometers, and anemometers had of course existed for centuries,
but the invention of the telegraph was what had made
it possible for people to spread the word when dangerous

(04:24):
weather was approaching. It also made it possible for people
who observed and recorded the weather to talk to each
other quickly and compile lots of data in order to
use that data to make predictions. The first weather network.
To put this idea into play in the United States
started in the eighteen forties thanks to the Smithsonian Institution.
The Smithsonian gave meteorological tools to volunteers who recorded their

(04:46):
observations and telegraphed them back to the Smithsonian to be
compiled into maps and then studied. The Smithsonian's work went
on until it was disrupted by the Civil War. Once
the war was over, though, the United States government recognized
that understanding the weather and being able to predict it
was a matter of national importance, particularly in the Western frontier,

(05:08):
where as we just mentioned, the government was actively trying
to encourage migration and the weather tended to be erratic. Eventually,
on February nine, eight seventy, Ulysses S. Grant signed a
resolution to quote provide for taking meteorological observations at the
military stations in the interior of the continent and at
other points in the states and territories, and forgiving notice

(05:31):
on the northern Great Lakes and on the seacoast by magnetic,
telegraph and marine signals of the approach and force of storms,
and he signed that into law. This put the observation
in recording of weather under the auspices of the Secretary
of War under the assumption that military discipline and precision
would be conducive to making accurate and timely weather observations

(05:52):
and predictions. These recordings and predictions fell to the Signal
Service Corps. A school of Meteorology was established and which
enlist it men and later officers learned basic meteorology, telegraphy,
how to install and maintain telegraph wires and the other
signaling equipment, and signaling itself. The Signal Service Cores started
off recording and issuing observations and predictions that were relatively

(06:15):
general and applied to large chunks of the continent, but
it gradually covered smaller areas with greater frequency and for
farther in advance. So in eighteen seventy three the Core
was mapping the weather data it received, making predictions, and
distributing these predictions as quote farmers bulletins to be displayed
at post offices. In eight one, signal flags replaced or

(06:37):
supplemented these paper bulletins. The Signal Service cores weather predictions
definitely were not perfect. They relied a lot more on
predicting where existing patterns would move than on the conditions
that would lead to new patterns emerging, and they also
tended to rely on whether folklore rather than actual science.

(06:57):
There was also a huge gap in whether not only
that the forecasters at the time didn't even know that
they didn't know that was the idea of the weather front.
We take the idea of a cold front or a
warm front or whatever for granted today, but that concept
did not even arise until nineteen nine, and it wasn't
a common part of weather maps until the nineteen forties.
So they're basically doing all of this mapping and predicting

(07:19):
unaware of the fact that these weather systems were organized
into fronts. Well, we figured it out eventually. Unfortunately, the
Signal Service itself was also hit with repeated accusations of
mismanagement and embezzlement, along with a lot of internal strife.
During these years. It was loaded down with inter departmental conflicts, bureaucracy, pettiness,

(07:42):
and infighting. In a lot of ways, the whole organization
was just dysfunctional. All that said, though, the Signal Service
Corps work made a huge difference in the basic quality
of life and weather preparedness, especially of people living on
the front. Here, these predictions although they were definitely flawed,
were also definitely better than nothing, and that was a
state of things. In eight We will get to the

(08:04):
details of the blizzard that we're talking about today and
how these forecasts failed to warn people about it, after
a brief word from one of our sponsors. On the
American Prairie, the winter of eight seven was brutal. It
had been particularly cold and particularly snowy for weeks. Conditions
on Native American reservations were particularly dire, with many reporting

(08:28):
a severe lack of food and other provisions throughout that
entire winter. The inches of snow that had fallen in
December we're still there at the beginning of January when
the weather turned again, this time dropping a thick layer
of sleet on top of that snow that made what
had been merely treacherous and difficult almost totally impassable. Temperatures

(08:48):
in early January were frequently in the double digits below
zero all across the Midwest. People had been sticking close
to home for weeks. This sounds utterly miserable, Uh, it was,
since I have winter rage disorder and get really crabby.
The second like the thermometer drops below forty, I cannot
imagine surviving something like this. Um. This meant that the

(09:12):
morning of January twelve came as a huge relief. It
was warmer than it had been in what seemed like ages.
The sun actually came out and the temperature gradually rose
to close to forty degrees fahrenheit that's four degrees celsius.
While a few people were suspicious about this abrupt break
in the weather, for the most part, this sudden appearance
of comparatively sunny warmth was a really welcome change. Almost

(09:36):
everyone jumped at the opportunity to get out of the house.
Children who hadn't been able to go to school in weeks,
sometimes the schools had even been closed completely rushed out
in comparatively light clothing. Adults tracked out from their homes
to more outlying areas of their farms and homesteads to
take care of chores that desperately needed doing that they
hadn't been able to do in a really long time.

(09:58):
People who needed to go to town to pick up
provisions did. Animals that had been cooped up in barns
and stables were let out to stretch their legs. Now,
I'm gonna just I grew up in the South. I
know that some of you forty degrees does not sound
like tim to party. But when it's been that cold
for that long and you've been cooped inside for that long,

(10:21):
even forty degrees feels like a luxury. I know this
now from personal experience, having lived in Massachusetts last winter
when we got a hundred and ten inches of snow.
I will walk outside in forty degree weather without my
coat on. So do not fault these small children for
rushing out without their scarves and gloves on this joyously

(10:42):
warm forty degree day. Yeah, it's all relative and what
you're used to. I always laugh when we're, for example,
like in Florida visiting disney World or something, and it
drops below sixty and you see people in hats and scarves.
It's all relative. Yeah. On the other hand, you will
walk down the street it's twenty degrees in Massachusett. Some
people are in short yeah. Yeah. However, back to this

(11:04):
particular blizzard. Unfortunately, these folks who were out frolicking in
these sudden warm weather were mostly ignorant of a weather
pattern that the Signal Service Corps had actually spotted on
the eleventh, that was the day before this beautiful day.
Lieutenant Thomas Mayhew Woodriff of the U. S. Army was
the one compiling the forecast in the Signal office in St. Paul, Minnesota,
where he had been stationed since the previous October. At first,

(11:29):
Lieutenant Woodriff and his assistant Sergeant Alexander mccaddy had thought
that this unusually low pressure reading at one of the
more remote northern Signal Signal Corps asked outposts on the
morning of the eleventh was just an anomally. It kind
of wrote it off as maybe a shoddy reading or
a fault and some equipment. But as the day wore
on and the scheduled observations rolled in from all the

(11:52):
other Signal Service Corps stations, it became clear that an
area of low pressure was moving down from Alberta, Canada
and then traveling southeast through the Great Plains. This was
a pretty typical pattern that Woodrift had observed many times before.
Areas of low pressure often moved into the nation from
Alberta and then traveled southeast, and so, also based on

(12:14):
past experience, he expected temperatures to rise in advance of
this low pressure area and then fall in its wake.
So based on all of these observations and his past experiences.
Forecast for January twelfth that he filed just after midnight
read quote indications for twenty four hours commencing at seven
a m. Today for St. Paul, Minneapolis and Vicinity, warmer

(12:37):
weather with snow fresh, subtly winds becoming variable. For Minnesota,
warmer with snow fresh too high, subtly winds becoming variable.
For Dakota snow warmer, followed in the western portion by
colder weather, fresh to high winds generally becoming northerly. The
snow will drift heavily in Minnesota and Dakota during the
day and night. The winds will generally shift to high

(12:59):
colder orderly during the afternoon and night. Even though he
expected falling temperatures after the low pressure area moved through,
Lieutenant Woodruff didn't think he needed to issue a cold
wave warning. He was already seeing above freezing temperatures reported,
so a cold wave warning just didn't seem warranted. So

(13:19):
at the night of the eleventh last morning of the twelfth,
people had gotten the weather forecast telling them to expect
that it would be cold, could warmer but then colder,
but not anything really alarming. However, on the morning of
the twelfth, when Woodruff got back to work, he once
again mapped out all the new weather observations that had
come in from the other Signal Core field offices over
overnight and in the morning. The weather system was still

(13:42):
moving along the path that he had predicted, and as
he had expected, temperatures in advance of it were warm
and behind it were cold. But it was a lot
warmer ahead of the low pressure area and a lot
colder behind it than he had expected. So at ten
thirty am on January twelve, would re issued a cold
wave warning for Dakota Territory, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. Doing

(14:07):
so meant sending extra telegrams out to the Associated Press
and other wire services, as well as other Signal Service
stations in the area. At post offices and stations, black
and white cold wave warning flags would be flown from
the time they got the notification until Woodriff issued a
takedown order. This is sort of the areas equivalent of

(14:28):
the National Weather Service warnings that we get today when
there is sudden bad weather that could be an emergency expected. Unfortunately, though,
this warning just came too late. Because of backlogs at
Western Union offices and various problems along the line, the
message to raise the flags did not arrive at many
of the outposts that had them until afternoon. By that point,

(14:51):
the storm was eminent, and most of the people who
were going to leave home that day already had completely
unprepared for the shift in the weather that they did
not know was coming. Starting in the early afternoon of
January twelve, the weather turned so suddenly that survivors of
this whole event said they had never seen anything like it.
The day was fine, and then it wasn't. People reported

(15:13):
being able to see while standing outside in forty degree
weather a blizzard moving in like a gray wall. Temperatures
plummeted back below freezing and continued to fall. Winds gusted
to forty miles an hour and beyond. In the words
of a Signal Service observer and here on Dakota Territory
quote at twelve forty two pm, the air was perfectly

(15:35):
calm for about one minute. The next minute, the sky
was completely overcast by heavy black clouds, which, for a
few minutes previous had hung along the western and northwestern horizon,
and the wind veered to the west and blew with
such violence as to render the position of the observer
on the roof unsafe. The air was immediately filled with

(15:55):
snow as fine as sifted flour. This extremely fine, icy snow,
it was incredibly treacherous. People's eyelashes froze together. The resulting
irritation led to tears, but those froze too. But even
if people could get their eyes open, the fine, icy
precipitation was so heavy and wind blown that they literally

(16:17):
couldn't see more than a foot in any direction. People
became completely disoriented, basically hemmed in by a wall of gray,
white blizzard. There are so many first person accounts surviving
from the time that people said they literally could not
see their hand in front of their face was not
an exaggeration. These flakes of snow and the pellets of
ice were also so fine that they pelted all the

(16:39):
way through people's clothing directly to their skin, lowering their
body temperatures precipitously, and then as all that snow melted,
soaking their clothing and refreezing it. The reason that this
is nicknamed the schoolhouse Blizzard is that the weather turned
while school was about to let out. Or it just
had let out. Teachers, many of whom were early older

(17:00):
than their students, were faced with the decision of whether
it was safer to send the children home or to
keep them in the schoolhouse, and in some cases this
depended on what warning, if any, they got blizzards coming,
get everyone home, or blizzards coming keep everyone in. Many
May Freeman, a teacher in Nebraska, made the call to
evacuate her students from their one room side school. They

(17:24):
had nailed the front door in place after the storm
blew it off two times, and it was only after
part of the roof was then blown away that she
made the decision that the risk was greater to stay
put than to try to go out in the storm.
She did manage to keep all of her students together,
and they made it half a mile to the home
where she boarded, where they took refuge and survived the storm.

(17:45):
In Groton, Nebraska, men showed up with a team of
horses and carts to take children home from school, and
they took all but one. He had turned back to
get a perfume bottle that he had forgotten in the schoolhouse,
and then when he emerged again, he immediately got lost lost,
and he was unconscious by the time his brother found him,
but his brother did indeed behind him. Rescues like this

(18:06):
were extremely rare in this storm. More often than not,
people who went after missing loved ones froze to death themselves.
Many of the other stories of school teachers trying to
look after their students have a much more tragic end.
Children and teachers got lost in the snow trying to
find their way to safety and died, and the same
was true of adults who were out and about on

(18:27):
their business. A train was stranded near Garvin, Minnesota, and
people from the town tried unsuccessfully to rescue them. Survivors
were actually trapped in that train for three days at
a static. A teacher who had gotten to collect her
pay hadn't even made it to the gate yet when
the storm blew in. The family she was boarding with
shouted at her from the door until their voices literally

(18:50):
gave out, but they couldn't be heard over the gale.
Many of those whether they ventured out into the storm
or stayed indoors and ran out of fuel but ultimately
survived the night, lost fingers and toes and even limbs
to frostbite. Many many animals died in the storm as well.
Livestock and other farm animals suffocated and were smothered by

(19:11):
the icy precipitation that froze over their notes and their
noses and mouths, or they simply froze to death. I
was not able to get my hands on a book.
There is a book of firsthand accounts of all this
called In All Its Fury that was written by people
who survived it in the nineteen forties. It's out of
print now, which is why I wasn't able to get
a copy of it to do the research. But it's
quoted a lot and a lot of them to realize

(19:33):
did use for research. A lot of stories are heartbreaking,
which is why we're going to take a pause from
them here and have referred from sponsor where we talk
about the aftermath of all of this. Ultimately, the Children's
Blizzard was part of a massive weather system that pushed
tremendously cold air as far south as Mexico. Pretty Much
the entire central part of the United States was affected,

(19:55):
with the timing of the blizzard being the most deadly
and damaging. Dakota Territory, Minnesota, Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas just
because it happened to strike in the early afternoon. The
cold wave that followed the blizzard, with temperatures well well
below zero all across across the Midwest, persisted until January.

(20:17):
By Saturday, newspapers across the nation were reporting on the blizzard,
first with stories of the deaths and the tragedies, and
then those of miraculous survivals and heroic efforts on the
parts of teachers to rescue their students. The Sunday after
the blizzard, at the Salem Mennonite Church in Dakota Territory,
the minister made an announcement that a farmer had found

(20:38):
five bodies in a firebreak on his property. They were
the children of several different families who were part of
that congregation, who had wandered miles off course in the
storm after being separated from their teacher and other classmates.
That school teacher, teacher at a shattuck that we mentioned earlier,
was found in the haystack where she had taken refuge,
having miraculously survived more than three days buried inside it. However,

(21:03):
she died after a series of amputations due to gang
green following severe frostbite. Other survivors of the initial blizzard
had similar fates, dying later on due to complications in
the late effects of their prolonged exposure. It's nearly impossible
to calculate an exact death toll from the Schoolhouse blizzard.
The areas that were most affected were also the most remote,

(21:25):
so the records are really spotty, and in some cases
people's bodies weren't found for weeks or months after the event.
The estimate, though, is often around two hundred or three
hundred people killed. This tragedy did prompt many communities to
reinforce their schoolhouses, replacing sod structures with frame and making
frame structures sturdier and more weather tight. Chief Signal Officer

(21:49):
Adolphus Washington Greeley really downplayed the severity and impact of
this storm and completely dismissed the idea that the Signal
Corps could or should have have foreseen it and the
monthly weather review. He called the scale of it an exaggeration,
and he placed the blame squarely on the fact that
much of the territory involved was newly settled. Lieutenant Thomas

(22:11):
Mayhew Woodriff was eventually made to give a report of
why the order to fly the cold wave flags had
come so late, but this seems to have been more
because of an ongoing dispute he had with another meteorologist
than over any actual concern about his performance. He was
ultimately offered another position in the army and left the
Signal Corps. He died of yellow fever during the Spanish

(22:31):
American War. Unlike some of our other episodes in which
a terrible tragedy led to reforms that prevent prevented such
occurrences in the future, this wasn't quite the case. In
that March, another massive storm struck, this time in northeastern
North America. It was so severe and profound that it
was nicknamed the Great White Hurricane that killed at least

(22:53):
four hundred people. Similarly, warnings about this storm came quite late,
in part because the Signal core station was closed from
midnight Saturday until five pm Sunday, which was a critical
forecasting window for this particular storm. Port cities along the
northeastern coast consequently got absolutely no warning that the storm

(23:13):
was coming, leading to thousands of people being stranded and
numerous ships at anchor being damaged or completely destroyed. The
storm basically blew in from the sea and shoved ships
at anchor into their moorings and into the shore and
just tore them to pieces. In eight nine, in part
because this March failure in forecasting had become such a

(23:35):
huge national embarrassment, I mean, the death toll was larger
and a lot more people were stranded. These were like
the bigger cities to be frank, people cared about more
than they necessarily cared about the frontier. Uh. The President,
Benjamin Harrison recommended that the task of forecasting the weather

(23:56):
be taken to be taken out of the hands of
the Department of War and given instead to the Department
of Agriculture by all civilian United States Weather Bureau was
in place, and that did eventually become the National Weather Service.
And that is a schoolhouse blizzard. It's so extremely sad.

(24:16):
Along with a basic introduction on on how weather forecasting
developed in the United States, UM, there was a There
are so many stories Number one in all its theory.
If you're able to get your hands on a copy
of that book, I'm imagining it's fascinating because it's all
these first person accounts that were written down by people

(24:37):
who were alive, uh in, And it was reprinted about
a hundred years after the storm camp but it's out
of print now. Um. My only option to read it
would have been to purchase a copy, which I couldn't
do with this particular time. But uh, but if you're
able to get your hands on it, maybe your library
has it. I'm imagining it has to be fascinating and heartbreaking. Um.

(25:01):
And then The Children's Bizzard by David Laskin was another
book that I read leading up to this, which does
make a lot of use of that existing firsthand material.
And so one of the things that I had thought
about putting into the episode that I did not was
from a letter from like a Norwegian homesteader who basically
came home and wrote this very matter of fact letter

(25:23):
about how he found his beloved wife rose to death
and then they found their child rose to death, and
the only one left alive was the baby who had
been like bundled up in a crib. The whole thing
enormously sad, in my opinion, sadder than the Sodder Children,
which took its place in my research schedule. Uh, I'm

(25:48):
home that you have less dour listener mail, my listener
mail is not particularly dour, and it's kind of interesting.
This is Uh. We've gotten several notes about our our
unearth and episode where we talk about one of the
discoveries from Egypt, in which you will find vastly different
spellings of the names of the people involved. And some

(26:11):
of them makes sense, but some of them feel like
somebody put all the syllables in a bag and shook
it up and then pulled them back out again to
make a new name. Um. So we've gotten several letters
and they all say basically the same thing. Uh. And
so I'm just gonna read from one of them, and
this from Libby, and Libby says, Hi, guys, I love
on Earth Show. I thought I might be able to
clear up some confusion with the many spellings of that

(26:33):
fourth dynasty Faris name. I'm not an Egyptologist, but I
am a historical novelist who specializes in ancient Egyptian fiction.
As such, I've done a tone of reading through Egyptology
texts and papers, and I'm fairly familiar with ancient Egyptian
naming conventions. The variation in his name and in virtually
all other ancient Egyptian names. You'll encounter, if you read
around enough, comes from two different quirks of the Egyptian

(26:56):
written language they called their language and culture kimp too,
by the way. I think that's camp it too, by
the way, which you'll find spelled in several different ways,
so maybe one of those is the way I pronounced
it the first time. Camas recorded very few vowel sounds.
Most of their writing shows only consonant sounds, so ranaferre

(27:16):
flash nef refras name would have been written, and this
is written as a series of rs ends and f's
in a couple of different orders depending on who wrote
it down and where may have actually been pronounced ray
nef ear oof or reneof or if or any combination
of vowel sounds. You can imagine Egyptologists have made educated

(27:39):
guesses about pronunciations based on vowel consonant combinations used in Coptic,
which is the closest living language to kem it to
you that is still spoken today. The lack of recorded
vowel sounds also explain explains why Kent Cass's name is
spelled many different ways in these articles, and why I'm
spelling it a totally different way here in addition to

(27:59):
the lack of vowel sounds, Royals names recorded on official
monuments such as a tomb were written vertically and encircled
by a cartouche and oval shaped rope that denoted divine
status of the royal blood. Rarely you will find names
written bottoms top instead of top to bottom. Actually we
don't know which direction was considered the standard and which
was the variation. I can tell you that earlier Egyptians

(28:21):
names tended to stress the ray before the neffer, while
later names New Kingdom a couple of thousand years later
tended to stress the neffer before the ray. So it
could be that the Egyptologists who wrote his name uh
nefer Effy was was just more used to working with
the New Kingdom sites and assumed that was a correct
way to say his name. I hope this didn't confuse
you further. Thanks for a great show, Libby, Thank you Libby,

(28:44):
so cool. It's very cool. Uh And if you know,
and if if any Egyptologists wants to confirm or refute that,
we would be happy to hear from you. I found
it extremely interesting and it lines up with basically the
same thing that several different um enthusiast and hobby is
egypt aficionados wrote into us. I found it super interesting

(29:04):
and also kind of highlights why sometimes figuring out how
to pronounce things in ancient languages is an impossible to
task for Holly and me well and even for scholars,
because things shift and evolve there they So I wonder
if all those people that wrote us are excited that

(29:25):
the I think the next Assassin's Creed is going to
be in Egypt, if I remember, if I saw the
correct kind line, So maybe it'll be fun for all
of us. I hope that we get a lot of
notes that variously referenced Assassin's Creed. That's why I thought
maybe our listeners would like that information that they do.
I know that people really liked it. When before the Holidays,
I went out to Boston Common to take pictures do

(29:47):
some periscope from the Christmas tree that that comes from
Halifax to Boston every year. After the um, after the
Boston and I'm after the Halifax explosion, suddenly it all
got twisted in my head. Um and I took a
picture of the frog pond in Boston Public Garden, which

(30:07):
is basically a place called Swans Pond and Fallout Floor
and I put that on our Twitter and people got
really excited about that. So we definitely have some Fallout
four fans and the listeners including me. Super cool yep.
So if you would like to write to us, we're
at History Podcasts at how stuff works dot com. We're

(30:28):
also on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash and it's
been history and on Twitter, I missed in History. Our
tumbler is missed in History dot tumbler dot com, or
on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed in History.
He would like to learn more about what we talked
about today, You can come to our parent company's website,
which is houstaff works dot com. Put the word lizard
in the search of bar. You will find an article
called ten Biggest Snowstorms of All Time, which does talk

(30:52):
about that East Coast blizzard of the Great White Hurricane
that we just talked about. Um that shoved shoved ships
into the shore and caused people to be lost at
sea and stranded and generally was awful. So you can
also come to our website, which is missed in History
dot com and find an entire archive of every episode

(31:12):
we've ever done, plus show notes For all the ones
Holly and I have done. You can do all that
and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot
com or miss in history dot com for more on
this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff
works dot com.